4D SSD Watch: TRIM Support Comes to RAID 0

Exciting news this week as Intel has announced (via journalists apparently, I can't find an official posting) that the TRIM command is now passed though to RAID 0 SSD arrays.

AnandTech reports that Intel has confirmed support for TRIM with RAID 0 SSD's when using Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver 11.0 and newer. Make no mistake, this is a huge milestone for consumer-level SSD's. RAID 0 SSD's offer double the bandwidth for sequential operations! They are also attractive from a cost standpoint because SSD pricing doesn't scale up linearly; the bigger the drive, the more drastic the cost increase. RAID 0 provides the opportunity to marry smaller, cheaper drives. But the downside was always the performance degradtion from not having TRIM support.

AnandTech's preliminary test results also indicate that RAID 1+0 (aka RAID 10) is also supported. This would be an even more important milestone for 4D deployments as it would add redundancy into the mix, in addition to better performance.

The major bummer here is that Intel 7-series motherboard chipsets are required in order to get this to work; i.e. you need a recent Intel-chipset-based motherboard to even try this. It's also Windows 7-only but that's not really anything new.